(Originally from the EIRTeam patreon page) Hello friends, it's time for our monthly project heartbeat development update, I have spent this month working mostly on PH, so phoenix got many massive upgrades and is inching ever closer to being released. I don't know why but I have spent the last few weeks working HARD on Phoenix, squashing many editor bugs and improving things here and there.

The funeral

As you may be aware, diva is all but dead, which is very sad, this has incidentally led to a massive amount of new sales for me, so it's a bittersweet moment. I hope I can carry the project diva torch as best as I can. Of course my budget will never be anywhere near diva, but PH also doesn't cost nearly as much ;) (P.S: If you are the owner of some music-heavy IP, like a music-focused anime or similar I'm open to negotiations of making a game using the PH engine, similar to miracle girls festival. I have console and mobile versions of the engine too).

Phoenix Beta 3

I released Phoenix Beta 3 last week, I could pad this post by copying and pasting you all the changes (and there are a loooooot of them) but I think it would be better if you read it straight from the source here. The important changes, besides the massive amounts of fixes are:

• UI is now true 3D, saving power and looking better, plus I added a frosted glass effect to transparent elements
• Modifiers are fixed, including hidden
• New console -> arcade conversion modifier, experimental
• Input map migration from old PH to Phoenix
• Disabled dx12 support (for now)
• Workshop now shows a gameplay type display
• Some changes to menus, specially pregame

Phoenix Beta 4

Today I'm also releasing beta 4, well, I've been releasing it as I worked during the week, but there's yet another shit ton of changes to the game and fixes to make it work better. Not much new stuff, but as I said before, phoenix is in a bit of a feature freeze until it's all sorted out and relatively bug free. God I fear for the day Phoenix is released and I have to write the changelog for all cumulative changes... Anyways here they are:

The controller dilemma

I was thinking about non-standard controller support in PH, and I came to a dilemma, I am considering only officially supporting non-gamepad-style controllers (like the xbox controller) and letting people use steam input to remap it. What do you guys think? (specially considering phoenix supports steam input, unlike stable PH).

Multiplayer

I've worked hard on some phoenix multiplayer stuff, it's almostready, most functionality is restored but I want to give it a good do-over. Either way, it should be made available soon. Unfortunately phoenix MP uses a different, newer, Steamworks P2P API for communication, so you won't be able to do crossplay between stable and beta.

Results screen rework

I redesigned the result screen, thanks to input from NeoRash from the PH server, the new one looks way nicer adn shows more info!

3D UI improvements

(It totally looks like wallhacks lol) Good news, I've revamped how the 3D UI system introduced last update works, it's simpler and does clipping properly, yay. I also managed to do away without dynamic canvas operations, unfortunately I've also managed to break DX12 and OpenGL whoops.. I may just drop OpenGL support entirely, but i could reimplement it if needed quite simply.

DJA rework

In another episode of EIREXE tries to fix direct joystick access, I think I've finally done it this time. I replaced how inputs behave, with the empty slide sound playing always, even when hitting. I also used a multi band compressor to try and make the slide empty sound less annoying, let me know what you think! Finally, I reworked how DJA behaves in general, including some funky deadzone intersection code that should make fast flicks more consistent. Previously, when you hit a direction and then flicked back the opposite way there was a chance your input would "skip" the deadzone and thus never re-trigger the slide/heart action, now the game checks if a line drawn from the previous joystick position to the current joystick position would intersect the deadzone, if it does and if it would end up outside the deadzone again it takes care of triggering actions and releases the way it should.

Interval tree accelerated gameplay

After many long years of pain dealing with inconsistent note clipping I decided to go the nuclear way. The new interval tree method the game uses allows for very fast lookups of what note groups are actually visible on screen with none of the issues that plagued old PH, specially regarding custom time out values.

Other fixes/small changes

• Fix MM+ song loading
• Fix sine wave gimmick effects
• Fix editor right click lockout
• Fix editor timeline scale being wrong in some circunstances
• Adjust slider piece particle and note hit effect
• Fix difficulty creation
• Fix editor settings selector
• Fix creating variants
• Improve mouse trap
• Fix potential loading screen error when downloading UI skins
• Fix workshop media auto downloads
• Fix editor help links
• Fix data race in get_song_select_sprite_set
• Fix editor help links
• Fix some timing point deserialization (intro skip, lyrics etc)
• Fix song metadata editor question marks
• Fix resource pack editor open pack window, scaling and inspector.
• Adjust main menu scaling and theming
• Fix practice mode layout
• Fix lyric clipping
• Fix error loading content dirs section
• Fix ofsetting timing points in the editor only offsetting notes even if that setting is unchecked
• Hide tempo change dialog by default
• Optimize editor inspector updates by deferring them whenever possible
• Optimize copying and pasting notes
• Fix PPD song loader not loading YT json
• Fix PPD video selector dialog
• Make script editor dialog a normal window instead of a Popup
• Fix script editor behavior and syntax highlight
• Fix editor background scaling
• Make editor playtest UI scaling match the game's
• Optimize results screen
• Fix some album art scaling issues
• Fix workshop browser pagination wraparound and backing from detail view
• Fix start menu party hat
• Fix editor note layer order
• Fix playtesting charts
• Fix editor playtest not playing video at the correct time
• Fix multi note deletion breaking
• Fix audio loudness for MM+ variants
• Fix DJA heart sustain note transfers
• Fix "the save as button doesn't seem to do anything" and "after going into the song selector in the editor and then going back to a chart you can no longer press space to play until restarting the editor"
• Rework some pre game screen architecture
• Fix missing async task queue thread joins
• Optimize song list container by using visibility notification rects
• Fix note usage deserialization and related menu elements
• Add CSV timing dumping

Swansong

Honestly haven't worked much on swansong, but I've made an execution system and switched to ghost of tsushima style GPU blood, it's fast as fuck and I think will look better once I add more randomness. I'll post a video of the blood in movement on Patreon right after this post goes live. After the combat and assassination system is semi-working, I would like to go work on parkour again, I have some ideas on how I'm going to do it. I've also been drawing some concept art, it's not good but it shows an idea i had for a hanging city inside of a rock formation (a ravine?). I also asked Guinii to make me some concept art for the protagonist, i'll showcase it here as soon as there's something done! I think you'll love the ideas I came up with.

Future

It's all looking very good, it's all going well, suspiciously well, this means we are well on our way to exiting early access relatively soon! Target is before august. On another personal note, my car finally passed inspection (which cost me a pretty penny) and I unfortunately had to reject a job at a company for personal reasons, but oh well, at least I will always have frieren... except someone forgot to put the base in the box for the figure, ffs.